2017 CTC Fall Retreat informs and honors IT pros

The 2017 CTC Fall Retreat and IT Awards drew a crowd of campus IT professionals for catching up with colleagues, learning the latest technologies and efforts across the University, and honoring their fellow IT pros for their work during the past year.

Variety of topics presented

The strong line-up of a dozen conference learning sessions for the November 3 event included the popular topics of Office 365, Microsoft Teams, the VR/AR Interest Group and Information Security projects.

Campus IT professionals provided additional sessions on such topics as the technology behind the University’s Alert Carolina system, web accessibility, Tableau and Splunk.

Michael Tiemann, an open-source software pioneer who serves as Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, presented the keynote. Tiemann spoke about the importance of the creative process in innovation.

Organized by the CTC Advisory Board and IT Awards Committee, the 2017 CTC Fall Retreat was supported by several University sponsors, including ITS and several campus ITEC members, and by six vendor sponsors: CDWG, Dell, Lenovo, Newline, Overleaf and SKC.

Looking forward

Event organizers included Hiawatha Demby and CTC President Paul Lamontagne

Event organizers are already taking stock of the 2017 event and considering ways to improve the Fall Retreat next year.

“Something we did different this year from previous years was instead of very work specific IT-related topics for our sessions, we attempted to bring in more topics not directly related to our daily work, such as the campus MakerSpace and VR/AR Interest Group,” said Paul Lamontagne, CTC President. “In the future, we will attempt to hold different topics at our sessions, such as professional development and technology used in the higher-education learning environment.”

Another thing that organizers did differently this year, Lamontagne added, was to send out a post-event survey to gather data and feedback. “We will use this to improve future fall retreats,” he said.

In fact, two sub-committees have already formed toward that goal. Dan Reeves in ITS will lead one group to redesign the IT Awards process. Lamontagne, who works in OASIS, will lead another sub-committee that aims to improve the CTC Fall Retreat.

2017 IT Award winners

Ceremony honored IT pros

The 2017 CTC Fall Retreat concluded with the IT Awards ceremony recognizing 27 campus IT professionals — both individuals and teams — for outstanding work this past year.